3 Ways to Teach Phonemic Awareness Activities Your Kids Will Love

Phonemic Awareness

Are you teaching phonemic awareness activities to your students? Your first graders still need a lot of practice with phonemic awareness.  Building strong phonemic awareness is fun, and can be easily incorporated into every day! 

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words and to manipulate them by segmenting, blending, isolating, and deleting. Phonemic awareness falls under phonological awareness which is identifying units of sound in oral language.  

Why is teaching phonemic awareness important?

Children need to be able to hear how our language works before they can ever learn how to read. We teach children that sentences and made up of words, words are made of units of sound. A child’s success with phonological awareness can lead to greater reading success.  

Teaching Phonemic Awareness Activities

1. Teaching Phonemic Awareness Activities Whole Group

Multisensory activities build stronger pathways in the brain. Sometimes when people hear the word multisensory they think it will make their lessons complicated, but making activities multisensory is super simple. As long as you are using two modalities at once it is multisensory. Here are two super simple multisensory activities to give a try. 

• Activity 1- arm tapping

Pick a word and orally tell it to your students. Have the class say the word together, then starting at the shoulder and working your way down your arm tap out the sounds in the word. 

For example, the sounds in cat are /c/, /a/, and /t/. You would tap your shoulder and say /c/, the middle of your arm and say /a/, then tap close to your wrist and say /t/. The final step is to blend your word together by running your hand from your shoulder to your wrist while saying the word cat. 

• Activity 2- sound stomping 

Again, you pick a word and tell it to your students orally. Stomp one foot and then the other for each sound in your word. Say the word again and jump both feet together. 

For the word cat you would stomp your right foot and say /c/, then stomp your left while saying /a/, then stomp your right again while saying /t/. Blend the word together by jumping with both feet and saying cat.

2. Literacy Centers For Teaching Phonemic Awareness

Ladder climb- in this activity students start with the bottom picture of the ladder, they say the sounds of the picture, then they look at the picture above it and figure out which part of the word changed. Students mark the beginning, middle or end of the word to show the change, and continue their way up the ladder. For example, cat to bat the beginning sound changes, then bat to bag the end sound changes. 

Sound smash playdoh

For this activity students make small balls of playdough for each circle, they sound out the word and smash a playdough ball for each sound. You can have students use their finger or a toy hammer! 

Literacy centers should be fun and easy for students to complete independently. You’ll love this post on creating literacy centers your students will love! After trying a million different kinds of literacy centers I came up with 6 steps to ensure my literacy centers have a purpose and will nurture my students’ love of reading.  You can get my 6 Steps to Creating First Grade Literacy Centers here for FREE!! 

3. Teaching Phonemic Awareness Activities in Guided Reading Groups

In my guided reading groups, I preview center activities for more direct targeting per homogeneous group.

I keep my literacy center groups homogeneous because it makes it easier for me to target student needs by group. When teaching phonemic awareness activities to my lower guided reading groups I preview the skills from literacy centers that I know will be more difficult. Basically, I do the same activity with them, like the ladder climb without the task cards.  I use a ladder picture on a cookie sheet with three colored magnets. We push the sounds up that stay the same and replace the part of the word where the sound changes. 

Hope these activities get your students moving and loving reading without it feeling like work! 

Happy moving, 

Alexandra